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Version: 0.2

Quick start

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Learn how to create and run Actors using the Apify SDK for Python.

Step 1: Create Actors

To create a new Apify Actor on your computer, you can use the Apify CLI and select one of the Python Actor templates.

apify create my-python-actor --template python-sdk
cd my-python-actor

This will create a new folder called my-python-actor, download and extract the Python SDK Actor template there, create a virtual environment in my-python-actor/.venv, and install the Actor dependencies in it.

Step 2: Run Actors

To run the Actor, you can use the apify run command:

apify run

This command:

  • Activates the virtual environment in .venv (if no other virtual environment is activated yet)
  • Starts the Actor with the appropriate environment variables for local running
  • Configures it to use local storages from the storage folder

The Actor input, for example, will be in storage/key_value_stores/default/INPUT.json.

Step 3: Understand Actor structure

The .actor directory contains the Actor configuration, such as the Actor's definition and input schema, and the Dockerfile necessary to run the Actor on the Apify platform.

The Actor's runtime dependencies are specified in the requirements.txt file, which follows the standard requirements file format.

The Actor's source code is in the src folder with two important files:

  • main.py - which contains the main function of the Actor
  • __main__.py - which is the entrypoint of the Actor package, setting up the Actor logger and executing the Actor's main function via asyncio.run().
src/main.py
from apify import Actor

async def main():
    async with Actor:
        print('Actor input:', await Actor.get_input())
        await Actor.set_value('OUTPUT', 'Hello, world!')
src/__main__.py
import asyncio
import logging

from apify.log import ActorLogFormatter

from .main import main

handler = logging.StreamHandler()
handler.setFormatter(ActorLogFormatter())

apify_logger = logging.getLogger('apify')
apify_logger.setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
apify_logger.addHandler(handler)

asyncio.run(main())

If you want to modify the Actor structure, you need to make sure that your Actor is executable as a module, via python -m src, as that is the command started by apify run in the Apify CLI.

Next steps

To learn more about the features of the Apify SDK and how to use them, check out the Concepts section, especially: